There was a curious mixture of mourning and celebration in that auditorium, an air of grief commingled with the excitement one might expect at a Broadway opening. The first poet read his work with dramatic fervor, as though hoping David Merrick was sitting in the audience with an offer to do a one-man show. In his poem, he compared Margie Ryder to a sparrow innocently striking an unexpected obstacle that had broken her body and snuffed out her life, “to fly no more,” he intoned, “to fly no more, except in boundless dreams, eternal dreams.” He lowered his manuscript, his head, and his eyes. There was a brief silence, and Meyer fully expected everyone to begin applauding, thankful when they had the good grace not to. The second poet had titled his poem “Voice,” and in it he told of an incredibly lovely voice that had been stilled.
“Shout,” he shouted, “scream against this indecency,
“Raise your voice to raise the voice
“Robbed by the obscene steel of death!
“For oh, there was beauty here,
“There was depth and beauty enough
“To fill a garden,
“A forest,
“A world.
“Oh, Marge, we cry,
“We cry out!
“Our voices rise in tumultuous grievance!
“Hopefully you will hear and know, hear and know,
“Oh Marge.”
There was another silence. Hawes wanted to blow his nose, but was afraid to do so. Luis-Josafat Garzon played a brief, lugubrious guitar passage to cover the tardy entrance of the third poet, a tall gaunt young man wearing a beard and sunglasses. His poem, Hawes felt, was a trifle derivative, but the audience listened respectfully nonetheless, and there was even the sound of tears throughout the reading.
“It was only a week or so ago,
“As I sat sipping my cider,
“That a woman was killed whom you may know,
“By the name of Marguerite Ryder.
“And this woman she lived with no other thought
“Than to give to the humans beside her.”
Hawes looked at Meyer, and Meyer looked at Hawes, and the gaunt, bearded, sunglassed poet began reading the second stanza.
“She was a child, yes only a child,
“In a tenement garden of dreams,
“And the love that she gave, was a love more than love,
“But it ended in futile screams.
“Someone tore her apart, someone stepped on her heart,
“Someone viciously opened her seams.”
The reading continued in a similar vein for the remainder of the morning. Unlike the assorted poets who read their wares, the audience seemed composed of people who could hardly be classed as hippies. A spot check of the crowd turned up neighborhood faces familiar to Hawes and Meyer alike; merchants, housewives, professional men, even a patrolman from their own precinct, sitting attentively in his off-duty clothes. The idea, of course, was not to glom the audience, but rather to take a bead on “ten of Margie’s closest friends,” any of whom might have done the dear girl in.
Discounting the mystery man who had met Margie in Perry’s Bar & Grille on DeBeck Avenue, and who had later returned in desperate need of her name, discounting him as a prime suspect because there were too many ifs involved (if he had finally remembered her name, and if he had gone to her apartment, and if she had let him in at that hour of the morning), there remained the likelihood that the person who had stabbed Margie was indeed one of her good friends, someone who could have been with her in her apartment at four or later in the morning. So Meyer and Hawes sat through two hours and ten minutes of bad poetry (including some lines attributed to Marguerite Ryder herself) while pretending they were at a police lineup instead, an entertainment now defunct but not missed in the slightest by either of the men.
The parade of poets was colorful but hardly instructive. Meyer and Hawes went backstage after the reading to talk to the ten budding versifiers, as well as to the guitarist Garzon. They learned to their surprise that there had been a party at Garzon’s house on the night Margie was murdered, with “mos’ of the kids” (as Garzon put it) having been in attendance.
“Was Margie Ryder there?” Hawes asked.
“Oh, yes,” Garzon said.
“What time did she leave?”
“She only stay a shor’ while.”
“How long?”
“She arrive abou’ ten o’clock, and she leave it mus’ have been close to mi’night.”
“Alone?”
“Perdone?”
“Did she leave the party alone?”
“Ah, sí, sí. Solo. Alone.”
“Was she with anyone in particular while she was there?”
“No, she drift aroun’, comprende? It was like a big party, you know? So she stop here, she stop there, she drink, she laugh, she was muy sociable, Margie, you know? Everybody like her.”
Which did not explain why anybody would want to kill her.
Meyer and Hawes thanked everybody and went out into the street to breathe some fresh November prose.
Steve Carella was supposed to take down the screens, but he decided to visit the Leyden apartment instead, which is how he happened to get hit on the head. Of course, he might have got hit on the head while taking down the screens too, but in police work there is a clear line between possibility and probability, and chances were a good sixty-to-one that he would not have been nursing a bump on his noggin that night if he had taken care of his household duties that afternoon, instead of running into the city to snoop around an empty apartment.
The reason he went back to the apartment was not, as Teddy had surmised, to get out of taking down the screens. (True, he did not enjoy taking down the screens, but neither did he enjoy putting them up, and he enjoyed getting hit on the head perhaps even less than either.) He had discovered through years of police work that very often you can’t see the forest for the trees, which is a fresh and imaginative way of saying that sometimes you have to step back for a long view, or closer for a tight view, in order to regain your perspective on a case.
In Carella’s thinking, a murder invariably served as the impetus that set in action a proscribed police routine. Often, in slogging through reports typed in triplicate, in deciphering the medical gobbledygook on an autopsy return, in tailing a suspect or interrogating a witness, in poring over questioned documents or ballistics data, it was completely possible to forget exactly why you were doing all these things, forget that it was indeed a corpse that had prompted this machinery into motion. When that happened, he found it advisable to return to the scene, and imagine for himself the details of what might have happened during the actual commission of the crime.
Also, he hated taking down screens.
The elevator sped him to the third floor. It was a self-service elevator, and the killer could have used it with immunity at any hour of the day or night — but had he? Would he have risked being seen by, say, a pair of tenants returning home from a late party? Or would he have more realistically used the stairway that opened directly onto the apartment’s service entrance? After all, the kitchen door had been found open by Novello, the milkman. Wasn’t it likely that the killer had entered and left by the same door? Standing in the corridor, Carella looked at the closed front door to Mrs. Leibowitz’s apartment, heard behind it the singing of her colored maid, and then walked down the hall to the Pimm apartment. He listened at the door. The apartment within was still.